One August afternoon in 2011 a wind-warped tree atop a hill in Oxnard, California, transfixed me. I stared at it, marveling at how the sunlight on its left side could be so pure, so brilliant and yet not searing.

At the same moment, New Orleans Saints Coach Sean Payton approached with a grin tickling the corners of his mouth. Payton walked up, leaned over and whispered in my ear, "you owe me."

Payton had taken the Saints to California for a week of training camp and NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune had gone with them, requiring my presence in that glorious weather. A year earlier, football had also compelled me to spend nearly a week in southern California, where I wrote about the BCS Championship from a room with a sliding door open all day upon a vista that included the Newport Beach Country Club, the Pacific Ocean and, on the shimmering horizon, Santa Catalina Island.

So people knock California all the time, but I've always loved the place where my younger brother was born while we lived in Point Loma housing courtesy of the United States Navy.

But I'm still trying to figure out what's going on out there and the comment stream at NOLA.com hasn't made it any clearer. Is it a land of milk and honey, riding super high taxes to perpetual growth? Will it always be a place where the girls' hair is soft and long and the beach is the place to go, or is it going to hell in a richly lined retirement basket?

And who deserves the credit or the blame? Some commenters talk about Republicans leaving the state in the hole. I see on Wikipedia, meanwhile, that "except for the period of 1995 to 1996 the Assembly has been in Democratic hands since the 1970 election [and] the Senate has been in Democratic hands continuously since 1970."